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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24031570">find shelter</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliarium/pseuds/deliarium'>deliarium</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Charioteer - Mary Renault</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Conditions best suited of all to unreserve, Frottage, M/M, Missing Scene, Oral Sex, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-03 02:01:49</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,844</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24031570</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliarium/pseuds/deliarium</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Ralph and Laurie seek relief in each other against an uncertain future.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Ralph Lanyon/Laurie Odell</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>37</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>find shelter</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Set during Chapter 15, on one of Ralph and Laurie's nights together.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The air-raid sirens go while they are lying in bed, warm limbs closely entangled after their mutual exchange of confidences has tailed off into a brief lull, the soft sounds of their breathing settled into a single, unified rhythm. </p><p>Laurie's heart stutters abruptly at the shrill interruption, and he draws in a quick, uneasy breath as he waits, straining his ears and steeling himself for the sound of impact. With bombings becoming an increasingly common occurrence in Bridstow, the looming specter of death seems closer to Laurie than ever, nearly as close as it had been at Dunkirk. But at least then he had been able to go down fighting for a time, instead of being relegated to this frustratingly helpless and vulnerable state, with a chronic ache in his leg and a bad limp.</p><p>He feels Ralph touching him in the dark—silent, soothing, like laying his hand on a vibrating instrument string—and Laurie's jangled nerves relax slightly. Maybe it's his trained officer's mentality, but Ralph never appears to react to these events with any outward sense of alarm. Or perhaps he has already made his peace dying like this. During one of their late night confessional states, when they had curled together and laid bare the deepest secrets of their hearts, Ralph had once told him he had always thought he would have died sooner, anyway. Though he had left it unsaid just when he'd thought it would happen.</p><p>At any rate, leaving Ralph's flat in the near future would be impossible now. Laurie is awash with an ambivalent mixture of relief and guilt over the decision being made for him, reprieving him of responsibility to take the steps signaling finality.</p><p>As if sensing the tempest of warring emotions taking place within Laurie, Ralph moves to drape an arm around him; without thinking Laurie reaches up to grasp it, digging his fingers into the lean, warm swell of Ralph's bicep. "Spud," Ralph murmurs, reassuring.</p><p>"I know," Laurie whispers back. He isn't sure what it is he knows, exactly. But ever since their relationship had become physical—exceedingly so—Laurie has had a strong sense of residual affinity linking them, until he couldn't say where it is his feelings end and Ralph's begin.</p><p>Outside the sirens continue blaring perilously, though the bombing hasn't started yet. Laurie wordlessly rolls over and tucks his head into Ralph's chest, trying to quell the sensation of panic and constricting tightness rising in his throat. The weight of Ralph's hand on his neck is steadying, as well as the gentle press of Ralph's lips against the crown of his head.</p><p>He's not certain if it's mostly Ralph's doing, with his experienced way of touching, or if it's Laurie's own heightened awareness of every point of physical contact and proximity when it comes to Ralph, but the tension is slowly easing out of him. Letting out a long, shaky exhalation, he focuses intently on those small caresses, the comforting solidity of Ralph's presence, to the exclusion of the rest of his surroundings, and gradually his body is his own again, his thoughts growing clearer, his breathing leveling out within his chest.</p><p>He peers up at Ralph, who is gazing at him with tender concern, and tries to communicate his gratitude through a silent look. Ralph's hair is endearingly mussed, the edges gilded in the soft glow of firelight. His tanned arms, with a strength belying their slim build, are holding Laurie in a loose embrace. Though still a little sore from their previous intimacies, Laurie feels himself stirring anew against Ralph's body. He is often caught off guard by the almost violent intensity of his libido nowadays, after months of it being rather dampened in hospital, to the point where he had become resigned to the possibility of it never coming back at all. But his health has been recovering more quickly than he'd anticipated, along with reawakened desires that he had only been barely conscious of before, now vividly given both form and permission.</p><p>Laurie shifts his position until he's straddling Ralph's lap, and they're kissing over and over, hot and frantic, rocking their bodies against each other with desperate urgency in the darkness. Laurie firmly presses his tongue into Ralph's mouth, his hands clutching onto Ralph's shoulders, so close he can feel the wild thrumming of Ralph's heartbeat under his skin. With a frisson of intense gratification shivering through him, he allows himself to become increasingly bolder with his physical demonstrations of love, the shyness and inhibitions that had possessed him during their first time stripped away, and Ralph sighs and folds under him, yielding.</p><p>The All Clear sounds some minutes later, jolting through Laurie's sheer, red-hot haze of pleasure. It isn't until then that he realizes the streets have been quiet all this time. If his will were somehow stronger—Laurie contemplates, pulling away to rest his forehead against Ralph's—this could provide him an excuse to pick up his things and head on back to the hospital. His battledress and boot are lying in a neat pile by the fireplace, across the room from where Laurie had haphazardly shucked them off—Laurie can't remember just when Ralph had moved them. But Laurie finds a strange reluctance now to leave all this behind. It would be simpler to stay in Ralph's arms, to not have to face the outside world and the uncertainty of the future—the future of the country and the war, as well as of him and Ralph. (Him <em> and </em> Ralph—a part of his mind always flickers with resentment at how easily Ralph's name should slot into the place that should rightfully be Andrew's, but he pushes the unwanted thought away, to deliberate over at another time.)</p><p>"It never used to bother me—hearing those sirens," Laurie mutters, looking down at his hands. "But here, with the raids—it reminds me of being on the beach at Dunkirk, with the bombs falling all around, and not being able to run or do anything about it."</p><p>"Yes. Your face was pale then, too." Ralph rests a hand on Laurie's cheek, rubbing circles into it with his thumb.</p><p>Somehow it occasionally slips Laurie's mind that Ralph had been at Dunkirk as well. "Do you still think of it often? Dunkirk, I mean." </p><p>Ralph pauses. "Well, yes, I did quite a bit in the weeks afterward. I had really nothing else to think of in hospital. My ship getting blasted, most of my crew drowning or being gunned down by the Luftwaffe. Being bloody shot in the hand. And of course there was you, caught up in the midst of it all." He tugs a stray lock of Laurie's hair that's been sticking out from behind his ear and smooths it between his fingers. "It mostly comes to me in dreams now."</p><p>Laurie takes a moment to imagine it—Ralph running briskly along the deck while barking orders, efficiently herding a gaggle of survivors onto life rafts, climbing the halyards as his torpedoed ship gradually flooded with water, waiting for the last passengers to depart before diving into the sea. In the prewar days he might have found it an exciting, even romantic image. But Ralph is not so much older than himself, after all, and his period of active engagement in the war must have been too brief for him not to be keenly affected by the heavy weight of responsibility for so many lives, or the guilt that accompanies a bleak sense of inadequacy and failure. Laurie's own institutional loyalty is mostly theoretical in nature, cultivated from lengthy philosophical debates in the halls of Oxford and later from the bonds forged out of necessity under gunfire—but for Ralph it is something more deeply fixed and profound, a core part of his identity and his self-worth, and any disappointment to those rigidly formed, self-imposed expectations he would feel all the more sharply. A painful knot of sympathy twists inside Laurie's chest; he doesn't know how best to communicate it other than through simple touch, skimming the tips of his fingers gently along the line of Ralph's jaw, his neck, his collarbone.</p><p>Eventually Laurie gets up to feed more pieces of coal to the fire, shivering underneath the eiderdown wrapped around his shoulders as he stares into the flames, which are leaping high and bright in the hearth. Ralph returns from a brief excursion to the kitchen, wearing a loosely knotted dressing gown and carrying two steaming cups of tea. He still isn't overly fond of tea himself, but it's become a kind of unspoken ritual for them since the wedding, and Laurie is oddly touched by the effort. </p><p>"Look at you, the tea expert," he can't help but tease, as Ralph hands him a cup and saucer.</p><p>"None of that cheek from you, Odell," Ralph replies with mock severity, his eyes crinkling in amusement. "Or it's—"</p><p>"—a hundred lines, on my desk, by tomorrow," Laurie finishes in near-perfect imitation of Ralph's crisp prefectly tones, and they both smile.</p><p>They drink for a bit in front of the fire, their conversation light and idle, sitting closely with arms and legs touching under the warmth of the eiderdown. Amid their soft laughter, a long, palpable ache of wistfulness steadily ebbs through Laurie. </p><p>He drains his cup, setting it aside on the floor with a clatter. Ralph leans over, tilting Laurie's chin up towards him; in short time they're breathlessly kissing and groping again on the bed with renewed fervor, erect and pulsing hotly against each other. It's unbelievable to Laurie now—Laurie thinks hazily, as Ralph trails open-mouthed kisses down his abdomen—that he could have gone his whole life without this, thinking he could live without it entirely, and now he couldn't even spend a solitary night away from Ralph's bed—couldn't stop himself from constantly wanting more. And yet each time, the uncertain possibility of eventually having to give all this up would render the future for him unbearably dull and lonesome.</p><p>Ralph slides further down to kneel at the edge of the bed, in between his legs; he presses a half-worshipful kiss to Laurie's hipbone and looks up at Laurie again, calm, measuring, expectant. A quiet intensity blazes in his cool blue eyes, his slight frame simmering with a tightly controlled energy that could burst forward and consume Laurie entirely, if he would let it.</p><p>Laurie swallows, a heady sense of power breaking over him in waves, as forceful as it had been the first time Ralph had seen him undressed. An unbidden host of memories, pierced through with dim nostalgia, floods through his mind's eye—images of those treasured glimpses of Ralph from afar at school, of seeing Ralph striding about in his immaculate naval officer's uniform, brisk, arrogant, untouchable—mingling with the sight of Ralph now offering himself up unreservedly on his knees before him. Somehow this only sharpens the feeling of warm arousal pooling in his groin.</p><p>Instinctively he reaches down to curl a hand around Ralph's neck, threading his fingertips into the fine, soft hair at its base.</p><p>Ralph's breaths are quick and hot on his skin. "What do you want, Spud?" His tone is rough, with a familiar hint of authority that sends a shudder down Laurie's spine, all the more exciting for its use in such an intimate setting.</p><p>"God. Ralph. Just—" Laurie breaks off. Ralph's hand is stroking his cock firmly now, applying a wonderfully rhythmic pressure that jolts Laurie to his core and causes his thighs to tremble.</p><p>"Tell me. You know I'll do—" Ralph wanders his hand a little further and squeezes him gently; Laurie abruptly gasps and arches off the bed, letting out a smothered curse. "I'll give you anything you want, Spuddy," he says, his tone softening, and his lips brush along the expanse of Laurie's lower thigh, resting briefly against the side of his shattered kneecap, like the ghost of a promise.</p><p>It feels startling to have a sense of total control, and yet not, at the same time. Laurie closes his eyes, struggling to calm the frenzied whirlwind of his thoughts until he can concentrate on a single, dazzling focus of want. "Your mouth. Please," he breathes out, his voice strained with longing.</p><p>Ralph bows his head in automatic obedience, setting himself with single-minded devotion to his task. Part of his hair spills over his forehead and into his eyes, the sun-bleached locks shining like a ribbon of pale silver in the firelight.</p><p>Laurie's mind shutters, just as it always does when Ralph does this. Ralph is as thorough and exacting in his love-making as he is in all other aspects of his life, knowing all sorts of blissfully obscene tricks with his tongue and his fingers that Laurie had hardly ever dared to imagine. He recalls Ralph mentioning that he's done this particular act with increasing frequency since Dunkirk—which Laurie suspects has been to compensate for the diminished functionality of his left hand. It should feel wrong to enjoy it this much, and perhaps his conscience will reproach him for it later, but in the moment there seems nothing more natural than for Laurie to run his hand through Ralph's hair and thrust into his gloriously pliant mouth, like a man seized and compelled.</p><p>Laurie tightens his grip on the back of Ralph's neck, driving himself deeper into Ralph's mouth, his throat; his guilt over this bit of selfish indulgence is immediately assuaged by Ralph's answering sounds of pleasure around his cock, the straight set of his shoulders quivering with arousal. He winds his good leg around Ralph's waist, bracing him in position as Ralph's throat continues working around him, drawing out little, shivery moans from Laurie.</p><p>Ralph's left hand is running up and down his inner thigh in lazy strokes, occasionally dipping lower to probe and tease other parts of him with knowing deftness. With how exquisitely sensitized Laurie is to Ralph's touch, even the lightest brush of those intelligent, ungloved fingers burns through him, threatening to tip him completely over the edge.</p><p>Finally Laurie gives a sharp cry and falls back onto the mattress in a surge of impossibly sweet pleasure, thrusting his hips weakly as Ralph holds him in place and brings him the rest of the way to completion.</p><p>After a protracted moment of silence, Ralph shifts back up the length of him, breathing harshly and gazing down at Laurie with a quietly satisfied expression. He buries his face in the crook of Laurie's shoulder as Laurie pulls him close, still dazed and caught up in the pleasantly diminishing aftershocks of sensation.</p><p>It always takes a while for Laurie to fully recover his senses, but when he finally does so, he notes that Ralph is still hard, and nearly to the point of release; it wouldn't take much more to bring him off entirely. He can sense Ralph holding himself back through sheer force of will, or self-denial, his tensed muscles poised to react to a single utterance or movement from Laurie.</p><p>The idle, tempting thought crosses Laurie's mind that he could make Ralph wait for a bit longer, gauge the extent of his neurotic, magnificent capacity for self-discipline before he cracks apart and succumbs to libidinous abandon. He knows, without needing to be told, that Ralph would do it if he asked, that he might even derive a vicious satisfaction from denying himself this release.</p><p>But Laurie decides for now to be kind; he strokes Ralph's hair tenderly with one hand and wraps the other around Ralph's stiffened length, working him until Ralph convulses and moans into Laurie's shoulder, his teeth grazing Laurie's skin. Laurie never fails to experience a slight triumphant thrill from the sight of that extraordinary control unraveling, until he's lying there pleasantly slack in Laurie's arms—raw, spent, broken open.</p><p>"Spuddy..." Ralph sighs into his neck, in a tone of utter contentment. </p><p>Laurie is overcome for a moment, as he normally is by these rare unexpected instances of vulnerability. He drops a light kiss onto Ralph's temple. "Ralph," he says, "you know I—"</p><p>The words catch in his throat—the truth, however complicated and terrifying. He has said them before, on the wedding night, in the burning throes of passion, but to say them now could only bring unwelcome pain to them both, with his own heart still defiantly uncommitted. And yet, he feels them all the same.</p><p>Ralph takes the hand resting in his hair and interlaces their fingers, understanding and absolving in turn, and Laurie slowly starts to breathe again.</p><p>After cleaning himself off with a nearby cloth, he turns himself towards the fire, letting his eyes drift shut as flickers of heat spark over his face; Ralph's body curves around his, a warm, reassuring weight against his back.</p><p>In this state of fragile peace, he tells himself that he need not think past tonight, past this moment of intimate shadows and firelight, being held in Ralph's embrace. Tomorrow, after all, would be another day.</p>
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